When I was in high school, there was a group of guys who used to torment me mercilessly. I never once got into a physical altercation with them, but they did just about everything else that could make an adolescent's life miserable -- verbal abuse, crank calls late at night, threats, and constant ridicule about my appearance to my athletic ability to my group of friends to my teenage crushes. They were so persistent in their attitude and I grew so fed up with it that one day I exploded at them in a rage, stopping short of actually throwing a fist but scaring just about everyone in class. Save for the meeting in the principal's office where I offered a rather tepid apology for that episode, I have not had any interaction with them since.
A few months ago, I found out that one of them died. He was 28.
For years, I harbored a grudge against him and his buddies for tormenting me. Actually, I think that this grudge wasn't waged against them, but rather my perceptions of them, even if the pain I felt in high school was real. In my mind, they were the Bad Guys, and I was the Good Guy. Cognitive therapists have sometimes referred to this pattern as "splitting" -- dichotomous or black-and-white thinking which can periodically contribute to poor decision-making, negative self-esteem, and depression. As the psychotherapist Mark Sichel has said, when an adult describes or processes information in black-and-white terms, he reverts to patterns and behaviors that he knew as a child.
As a teenager, I never cared to think of this kid as anything but an enemy. At the time, I figured that since he was part of a cohort that treated me poorly, what else was there to know about him except that? But after the initial shock upon hearing of his death, I spent a long while reading the comments from his family and friends on his online obituary. They were, as one might expect, heartfelt recollections of his life -- about his career, the schools he attended, the jokes he told, the music he loved. In just a couple of hours, I learned more about this young man's life than I ever did while in high school. I will not share any of those details here, except to say that he was a much more complex individual than the primitive Bad Guy I had formulated in my adolescence.
After reading these stories, I briefly lapsed back into my familiar, bitter high school memory -- a black-and-white, splitting photograph of my childhood where he was the Enemy, and I the Oppressed. I had long been used to that pattern. But then I imagined his parents. I never saw them before, but I didn't have to. I imagined they were like mine -- loving, caring, proud of their son, always eager to welcome him home for the holidays. Then in a moment's notice, they lost him. It was only too clear that the grudge I harbored in my mind was nothing more than chasing ghosts. Any pain I had suffered from my experience with this young man in high school was dwarfed a million times over by the devastation his mother and father suffered from losing their child at such a young age. No parent should ever have to face that tragedy.
Before I went to bed that night, I listened to the "Quaerens Me" of Hector Berlioz's Requiem. For reasons I barely understand, the music sparked a powerful feeling of emptiness. I saw my own mother's face, tears streaming down as she stared at my coffin. I stared back, lifelessly wishing it had never happened. This was, I thought, what his mother saw that day.
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I've been mulling over these thoughts for a while now, but they were recently triggered again by the events of recent days, though clearly the events and memories are extremely different. When I first learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed, the surprise wore off and settled into a similar pattern: Initial anger over the memory of 9/11, followed by a pronounced emptiness. That feeling of emptiness was not inspired because the horrific morning of 9/11 wasn't personal. Besides the fact that my brother and father were on a plane over the East Coast at roughly the same time that the first tower had been hit, I had family members who went to school in New York at the time, who could see the carnage unfold from their classroom windows.
The reason I now describe my reaction to bin Laden's death as empty is because, in spite of my sadness and anger over my recollection of 9/11, I cannot help but remember the tragedies that have unfolded as a result of our country's response to bin Laden's crime: Two wars, the erosion of civil liberties, the torture of prisoners, the frightening expansion of an unchecked national security state, hundreds of thousands of civilians lost, and untold destruction in the Middle East that will likely take decades to repair. The blood that has been paid just to reach the milestone of this past Sunday evening has been grim, which is perhaps why I don't feel any sense of personal closure in spite of bin Laden's killing. There's also a certain symmetry to this story for me, considering that I was in high school during 9/11.
In closing, let me state what I hope is absolutely clear: The point of this diary was to examine my own experiences, personal demons, and memories in the wake of death -- and not to compare a mass murderer with an old rival from high school. There is no comparison between the two. None. Bin Laden was evil. This kid I knew was not. When I knew him as a teenager, he was -- to paraphrase a quotation from Howard Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby -- just a garden-variety asshole, and how many of us can say that we've never been one or acted like one at some point in our lives? My own temper towards him and his friends proved that I was guilty of the same offense.
In any event, that's not who he was to his family. To them, he was a bright young man with a wonderful future ahead of him. To all of us, even me, he was human, and not simply the Bad Guy of my childhood imagination. And no matter how negative I may have felt about an old high school acquaintance during and after my adolescence, I cannot separate my memory of him from my empathy for his parents' loss -- just as I cannot separate my anger over 9/11 from my sadness over the disasters of American foreign policy response to it.
All I can do, I suppose, is to continue to learn, to grow, and to move on. I'm trying.